“The picnic was an example of that sphere of which ‘Oh, my dear, too killing ...’ is the motto. You educate women—to that. I might have been under one of those four hats—only I’m not pretty enough. You have done nothing to prevent it. I might have been an ‘Oh, my dear’ girl, but thank heaven I’m an incendiary instead.” That was the end of that argument. The gardener could not reply as his heart prompted him, because the arguments that pressed to his lips were too obvious. Obviousness was the eighth deadly sin in his eyes. He would have agreed with the Devil rather than use the usual arguments in favour of virtue. That was his one permanent pose. A little way off, on a low green hill, the suffragette pointed out the home of a scion of sweated industry, the house she intended to burn down. High trees bowed to each other on either side of it, and a little chalky white road struggled up to its door through fir plantations, like you or me climbing the world for a reward we never see. “I’m sorry,” said the gardener. “I love a house that looks up as that one does. I don’t like them when they sit conceitedly surveying their ‘well-timbered acres’ under beetle brows that hide the sky. Don’t burn it. Look at it, holding up its trees like green hands full of blessings.” “In an hour or two the smoke will stand over it like a tree—like a curse....” When they parted the gardener liked her a little because she was on the wrong side of the law. There is much more room for the wind to blow and the sun to shine beyond the pale—or so it seems to the gardener and me standing wistful and respectable inside. It is curious to me that one of the few remaining illusions of romance should cling to a connection with that most prosy of all institutions—the law. I forgot to mention that the gardener borrowed a shilling from the suffragette, thus rashly forming a new link with the world in place of the one he had relinquished to the girl Courtesy. The worst of the world is that it remains so absurdly conservative, and rudely ignores our interesting changes of pose and of fantasy. I have been known to crave for a penny bun in the middle of a visit from my muse, and that is not my fault, but Nature’s, who created appetites and buns for the common herd, and refused to adapt herself to my abnormal psychology. It was interesting to the gardener to see how easily the suffragette parted with such an important thing as a shilling. Superfluity is such an incredible thing to the hungry. The suffragette gave Holloway Gaol as her permanent address. Thus accidentally bribed, the gardener, feasting on a cut from the joint in the next village, refrained from discussing women, their rights or wrongs, or their local intentions, with the village policeman. “She won’t really dare do it,” he thought. (I may here add that I was not asked by a militant society to write this book. I am writing it for your instruction and my own amusement.)